41–50 of 178 posts
>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
Worth noting that this article is 25 years old. The world was very very different back then, especially when it comes to software engineering.
Context switching is a problem when the cost of switching contexts is non-negligible -- but in the age of agentic development is that still really true? Surely yes for some problems, but for many others I would argue it no longer is.
A personal anecdote for you:
At my company we have a local development CLI our devX team built, it allows for agents to interact with standing up, tearing down and managing local stacks for our software suite. When I receive customer feedback about a broken button, or a poor UX experience, I simply start up a prompt:
/metal user X reported an issue on the trial balance page, they encountered a blank page when using the inception to date filter. We need to investigate the root cause, spin up a new stack, and resolve the bug.
Then off to the next task, maybe some few hours later I'll check back in on the session and I'll see:
> PR created: https://github.com/company/repo/pull/12758295 > QA URL: http://localhost:8400/ > Summary of root cause and fix: lorem ipsum lorem ipsum
After a quick QA session I validate the fix, confirm that our claude reviewer has approved the PR and merge the PR to deploy. The mental burden of switching to this task is quite low, orders of magnitude lower than it would be 25 years ago.
I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread. I must admit, if this is the new way of doing software development (eg: not actually programming but working with LLMs) I am not going to…
This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us. On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it…
Absolutely. I've tried mediation in many situations and some classes but it's just not for me. My ADHD brain doesn't work that way. It's painfully boring and not relaxing at all. What does work for me is a walk through nature after a stressful day. There's another thing that works even better but too fringey and a bit nsfw to go into detail :) But anyway mediation definitely does not.
You need to find what works for you.
And if you can't, THAT should be a big red warning sign for you.
For anyone interested in Vipasanna mediation in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw: https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/
As someone brought up in a Hindu household (with Brahmin orthodoxy at that and all the casteism that came with it) and having learnt to shun all of that culture, and the religious indoctrination, here's the essence of mindfulness meditation that I was taught that I still practice and find useful. 1. Sit somewhere comfortable. Sitting "cross legged" or with your "back straight" as the guide linked to above advocates i…
>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
Meditation - «getting used to» A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise. Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable. When it comes to joy killers because of AI, then it is di…
> major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?
I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread. I must admit, if this is the new way of doing software development (eg: not actually programming but working with LLMs) I am not going to…
Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/